Food Trucks

I can’t tell you how glad I am that the Seattle City Council passed the food truck ordinance. Having hotdog vendors and taco trucks downtown is great. You can grab one on the go. You can realize it’s 10:30 PM on a Saturday and you haven’t started anything, so you know what it’s time for a hotdog. In the suburbs or further out you don’t get that. Also, any additional eyes on the street and incentive to get people walking at night is going to be good for the city.

Of course, the quality varies from place to place. Generally though, they’re pretty good food. And if you’ve had a few drinks and are stumbling home, the quality of the food isn’t really the prime concern.

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Street meat is alright with me as long as they’re inspected regularly. Make sure they aren’t using any esoteric ingredients or have any propensities to scratch or pick at themselves in odd places while they work.

The startup cost for a street vendor is also a whole fuck of a lot lower than for a restaurant. As in, you need a bank or venture capital to open a restaurant. You can open up a cart or a truck with a little help from uncle Manny and grampa Joe.

And Manny and Joe are going to give you a better deal and are much more worthy of your money (you’re the one paying the interest after all) than some fucking bank.

Assuming that we are not talking about big chain/franchise operations, most local restaurants are not opened with bank or venture capital support. They are opened using leased premises, and the owner’s own money or that borrowed from close friends or families. Trying to get bank loans for a business is extraordinarily hard, because banks are well ware of the failure rate in the restaurant business.

One of the reaons independent investors don’t flock to invest in restaurants is that the amount of profit is minimal, and the difference between making a small profit or a big loss is often dependent upon the effort of specific individuals – the chef, the owner, etc. It can’t be reduced to a formula or SOP. They have to keep constant watch on the cost of ingredients, portion control, making sure food doesn’t “dissapear through the back door” with the staff, the menu stays fresh, etc. Often the difference between a profit and a loss is simply whether the owner actively works in the restaurant daily (an exhausting schedule), or if he/she tries to remain passive and hire others to do that work.

When restuarants fail, it’s usually because it can’t meat the monthly lease + payroll expense. The payroll can be reduced some if sales plumit, but you always need a cook or two and a wait staff. Smaller restaurants, especially ethnic ones, rely on using the entire family when the going is tough. But the lease is the nut which has to be met every single month.

Street sales have a different dynamic, in that there is a nominal equipment/space lease, and the cost of the truck includes the cost of the cooking equipment.

So the question is: will street vendors cause to much competition for local eateries?

@6 Hmm… I know a bunch of people in the biz and they opened and operated for the first year or so thanks to small business loans from banks. Families generally don’t have that much money. You’re not only looking at the cost of getting the doors open, but you’re going to need operating capital as well. I can’t remember the exact costs of my friends places and they’ve been open for a while, but I’d guess their little places were close to 80K all in. And those are in cheaper places to operate than Seattle.

At this point trucks and food carts are still within family budgets. Here’s one that opened for 18K.

re 6: On the other hand, that guy that owns Beecher’s Cheese at Pike Place has invested in a truck size sandwich-mobile shaped like a pig that competes with the little mom and pop stands at our local farmer’s market.

I’ll bet he’ll be the first guy cryin’ about unfair competition.

Nobody buys stuff at a street vendor if they have time to sit down at a restaurant and eat.

Miohael @ 8: Well, one thing I forgot to mention is that banks will sometimes finance restaurants if they are fully secured (i.e., a mortgage on the house of the owner for the full value of the loan). Maybe that’s where the money came from?

Celebrity chefs are a different matter, but I haven’t dealt with any, so I don’t know how they set up their financing.

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